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Steve points me to another weird argument for diversity in elite schools in The New York Times, Elite, Separate, Unequal: New York City’s Top Public Schools Need Diversity, which sidesteps the fact that students of Asian background are overwhelming these institutions. The writer seems to put a particular focus on Stuyvesant High School, which is only 3 percent black and Latino. But if you see its US News profile you notice that Stuy is 76 percent minority! That’s because 72 percent of Stuy students are of Asian background. Only 24 percent are non-Hispanic white. In the New York City public schools Hispanics are 41 percent, blacks 28 percent, Asians and American Indians 17 percent, and whites 15 percent. Whites are over-represented at the elite schools, but not nearly as much as Asians.
It isn’t as if The New York Times hasn’t covered this particular angle, For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones, or To Be Black at Stuyvesant High. An important point to observe here is that Stuyvestant students are not economically privileged, 45% receive free or reduced price lunches. The culture of test-prep which is helping produce these figures does need to be examined; see Up-and-Crammers, which highlights why there has been recent Bangladeshi success in getting into selective New York City public schools. But if “holistic” admissions are used everyone knows what the outcome will be. The proportion of Asians will drop, yes, and blacks and Hispanics will increase. But it is also plausible that the proportion of whites will increase, because white students come from backgrounds with the cultural fluency to understand the importance of broadening extracurricular activities, some of which might be costly in terms of time and money.
This all brings me to thinking about an issue which came up in Peter Heather’s The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders. Heather points out that Procopius’ Secret History, much of which is crudely pornographic, can best be understood as a form of satire which would be transparently obvious in its intent for its intended literate audience. Intellectuals in antiquity assumed a particular background in literature which allowed for an allusive and multi-layered form of writing, where casual references might point to a deeper meaning or connection than a plain reading to the uninitiated might suggest. Op-eds which blatantly ignore the demographic elephant in the room when it comes to American elite education strike me as similar, as the omission is obvious to any “insiders.” I have friends who have gone to Stuyvestant, so I am casually familiar with its demographics. But to the typical national middlebrow reader of The New York Times such realities are not obvious, and the standard racial paradigm of the United States since the 1960s (where Latinos are added as auxiliaries to the story of blacks in relation to whites) can be marshaled as an interpretative framework. But the authors of such works, often the product of elite education themselves, have to know how outmoded and anachronistic such a discussion is. So why continue with this line of logic? I don’t have the patience to construct the games being played here, but obviously a plain reading makes no sense.
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Not just the culture of cramming, but the culture of gaming and cheating. Once you spend a lot of time working with kids who have advanced or proficient state test scores, or over 700 on every section of the SAT, yet don’t have the vocabulary or math understanding you’d expect with those scores, you start to doubt whether or not the scores are genuine.
I’ve written a lot about my doubts and am not asserting anything beyond this: some element of the high scores for some kids aren’t genuine, and are achieved by either cheating or some rote memorization routine that doesn’t entail the underlying knowledge. Moreover, once in the schools, the kids are cheating to an extraordinary degree and yes, far more than well-assimilated Asians or whites cheat. They aren’t just cheating on the entrance tests, but on the SATs, the APs, the in-class tests, and homework (which sounds minor, but a lot of kids fall off the A wagon because of their lack of dedication to homework, while collaborative cheating makes it much easier to pretend.)
As to why this aspect is ignored: several related reasons, I think.
1) Asians have historically been the trump card to the argument that our institutions are racist and can’t allow non-whites to succeed, so journalists are used to ignoring them.
2) Journalists are high achieving whites, and this is a class that knows pretty well that much of the Asian academic story is less than pure. We’ve been seeing huge number of stories about overseas Asian cheating, as well as the cheating that overseas Asians do in order to get to US colleges. I think that’s as close as they get.
3) The genuine story on Asians—that they appear to be gaming our systems to achieve such huge overrepresentation—is neither easy nor appealing. And the fix primarily benefits whites, the usual villains.
4) I live in an area that’s heavily Asian, and the white population–an overwhelmingly liberal one–is not particularly enamored with what’s happening. Start reporting on it, start giving that unhappiness a voice, and where does it go?
I don’t think any of this is conscious. But I agree with you that their continued ignorance of this reality is hard to believe, and I think these various factors are bumping around in there.
Re: education realist
I didn’t get the impression that this blog post is implying that Asians are gaming the system. But you did go out of your way to overtly state that in your wordy comment, which is very short on evidence of any kind, just anecdotes and insinuations about sneaky Asians cheating.
The middle-american middlebrow reader of the New York Times may not fully grasp what’s going on with Asians in elite educational institutions, but people in places with lots of Asians do know. Friends of mine are sending their son to Catholic school, partly out of tradition (Dad went to a Catholic school), but partly because the local public school, one block away, is 90%+ Asian, and is essentially a cram school now. Lowell High School in San Francisco is only 45% Chinese because there’s a court order that limits the number of Chinese there. Other East Asians have their own quotas – that 45% is *just* for Chinese students.
well, i didn’t say anything specific, just pointed to the weird lacunae in this genre. as for asians cheating, it’s obviously a problem, especially with international students. and the whole orientation toward test prep and a mimicking of korean cram school culture isn’t something that benefits society, though it benefits particular individuals. but we do need to quantify it too. institutions like cal tech also have high proportions of asians in many disciplines where cheating to get in by incompetents would be pretty transparent (though that leaves competent cheaters).
one rule of thumb for urban whites with $ seems to be to avoid too many underrepresented minorities…and overrepresented minorities, for different reasons. the reasons why are what are being alluded to here, that too many asian students are driven by ‘tiger’ parent cultures to achieve, without giving much thought to what they are achieving. from a social point of view this is a waste and basically signalling competition.
The primary reason some Asian groups are disproportionately represented at the top of the academic pyramid is because of their innate talent and drive, not because they’re cheating.
If you consider that a problem, there’s no cure for it. If you change the system in the hopes of blunting their advantage, they will adapt. Change the test, and they will ace the new one. Change the criteria, and they will master the new material. Talent and drive can overcome almost any obstacle (short of quotas).
Slowing down legal immigration would help. The ferociously competitive Asians currently here would slowly acclimate to American cultural norms in much the same way Japanese-Americans have. But I suspect they will always be overrepresented at the top of the academic heap, and it won’t be because they’re cheating.
Yeah, like any kid of any background has given much serious thought to what they’re achieving.
What’s wrong with parents instilling habits of success in their children? Go to school. Work hard at your studies. Follow your teacher’s instructions.
These generally ought to be considered positive things.
Cheating should be discouraged and punished severely. But I dislike the assumption here that cheating flows smoothly into Asian parents demanding their kids achieve at school, as if the two are one and the same. Or even close to similar.
There’s nothing wrong with a little honest competition for white kids who think they’re entitled to cruise into the best colleges.
pincher, just to be clear, i’m less interested in the cheating angle, which is more a symptom, than cramming. the problem with cram school culture is pretty obvious IMO insofar as it might result in good test score outcomes, but less creative productivity in teams and ability to think improvisationally. at the very top of the cognitive distribution it probably doesn’t matter much, as people can shuck off these strategies, but lower down the curve it seems they become more ingrained.
of course probably the best way to forestall the vicious circle of studying-for-the-test would be to use a highly g-loaded intelligence test. unfortunately not likely to happen.
Razib,
I accept there might be some problems with the cram school mentality and creativity, but I think they’re exaggerated.
I have the opposite view you have, though. Lower down the curve, I believe there’s less need for creativity and more need for just showing up and doing the work. Asians are damn good at that.
Higher up the curve (and I’m talking about the top two percent here), I wonder how effectively an Asian brought up with the cram school mentality can be at producing creative ideas proportionate to what we would expect given his intellect and schooling. Can high-IQ East Asians brought up in this environment break free of the intellectual habits of a lifetime and start to produce creative ideas? I’m not sure.
There’s also an American tradition of valuing hard work which I think gets slighted in these discussions, as if Asians are doing something inherently un-American by working hard and trying to succeed. I think of Ben Franklin and his advice on working hard, which formed the ethic for American entrepreneurs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Or Thomas Edison and his idea of genius being 99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration.
White Americans used to value hard work, and I find it unsettling that they would now be threatened by someone else’s productivity and high goals.
re: deleterious effect of cram schooling on the curve, i guess that’s an empirical question….
How can you tell that cramming is bad for improvisation or teamwork? These seem to be widespread beliefs, but I don’t know where they come from. Is it from comparing recent Asian immigrants to later generations?
1. The public schools in NYC are so bad that middle -class parents will bust themselves to get their kids into private K-8 schools. Then move them over to better, specialized HS. So using public school populations biases your results.
2. The parental expectations of children’s grades in Asian families is probably higher then for other groups. Social activities and successes and much less important in at least Chinese families. Etc.
3.Jensen you may remember had whites in the middle between blacks and east Asians.
Educational realist. Do you have hard data on cheating rates or just a special voice that informs your posts?
Me? I believed Jensen.So I have had kids with an East Asian 🙂
“Education Realist” has blogged about her experience with Algebra students who cheat. Although the post “Cheating” doesn’t discuss their ethnicities.
I’m of the opinion that access to higher education must be assessed on an individual basis. I could care less what the numbers by ethnicity look like.
Pretty sure educationrealist is a male.
As for his suggestion though, I think he has been overlooking some psychological and social issues as well as not really pouring over raw statistical numbers as opposed to anecdotal experience. In particular, I really think he needs to consider the fact that students lie. Teachers have little opportunity to directly access the relevant data and confirm students’ SAT and AP scores, so I’m doubtful that has really influenced his conclusions, while in day-to-day talk students lying about their performance is rampant, everywhere. One or two students boast about getting high marks, legitimately and not “cheating” and a larger number of their friends, not wanting to be embarassed, will *say* they had at least similarly high performance even if they didn’t. This confusion into thinking students are managing to do relatively rare and difficult things things such as cheat on the SAT is less likely instead of simply lying about their scores in casual conversation. Across the United States as a whole, Asian performance on national level metrics does not seem particularly skewed by cheating.
Second, evidence that supports Asian Americans students are performing well through hard work and effort is that Asian students who are not in the “cognitive elite,” however you define that, but are merely pretty good are the ones who are able to achieve and bring up the numbers through the high school level. A higher proportion of Asians compared to white students and especially whites not in liberal, upper-middle class areas are the ones achieving good results, which is what would be reflected by hard work and effort as opposed to alternative hypotheses. This is supported by the fact that Asian Americans don’t in the same disproportionate manner as in high school go on to do things like earn PhDs, compared to white Americans; there are just large numbers of students doing their best through high school. Obviously for other minority groups there are achievement concerns, but not counting foreign immigrants this is how the numbers stack up and make sense since maybe 10% of students can reach high achievement levels in high school but only 1% of students earn PhDs. Alternatively, you could be concerned about the “pipeline” issue for Asian American students falling off in higher education (it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that there is a little effect foreign nationals driving out actual Asian Americans) if you thought high school level performance should reflect future achievements, but that is really just the wrong conclusion for most of what we see.
Razib, I agree that the gaming issue is a big deal, and I also readily admit, again, that I don’t know the degree to which it’s cheating vs. gaming. I disagree with Pincher that it’s just hard work ethic. I’ve worked with hundreds of kids in the demographic (not just Asian, but recent Asian immigrants, 1st or 1.5 generation), and the gap between their abilities and their test scores is often shocking.
“deleterious effect of cram schooling on the curve, i guess that’s an empirical question….”
If kids are taking 4-5 AP courses and getting straight As, but not maintaining (or even having in the first place) the underlying knowledge, and then they are going on to Organic Chemistry or whatever weed out courses exist, and cheat there, then it’s not just having a deleterious effect on the curve, but also discouraging other students who assume they are less qualified, when in fact they are simply less motivated to cheat and/or game a knowledge they don’t actually have.
BTW, Caltech has a growing problem with cheating, and given the demographics, it’s probably linked to their Asian population. No evidence, though.
“I didn’t get the impression that this blog post is implying that Asians are gaming the system. ”
Hence “not just” this, but also that. And it was relevant to the extent that Razib was wondering why it’s not discussed.
No data per se, just a whole bunch of anecdotal data from a dozen years working with high, medium, and low ability and income kids of all demographics, with a special concentration in recent immigrant Asians. Way, WAY more experience than anyone else has, to the best of my knowledge. The cheating/Asian issue is generally acknowledged by the schools, without getting terribly specific.
The links all have data that most find relevant:
Asian Immigrants and what no one mentions aloud
SAT’s Competitive Advantage
Timothy Lance Lai: Reading Between the Lines
College Admissions, Race, and Unintended Consequences
Advanced Placement Preferences: Asians vs. Whites (not about cheating)
I suppose it would be possible to cheat your way through the first two years at CalTech. After that, you would be hung out to dry because the classes are so small, and the material is so current.
i echo #17. i can see cheating to make it through HS and early years of college. but in STEM at some point you can’t keep cheating in the USA unless you’re a very good con artist who is skilled at diverse frauds. in addition, it is well known that asians are represented appreciably in the mathematical/physical sciences, and this where intellectual capacities and variation is pretty clear at the graduate level. additionally, there’s a robust literature on IQ which shows pretty clear that east asians have a modest advantage in relation to whites, so we’d expect some ratio skew at the proportion of the curve. this doesn’t negate the reality of cheating, which is well known as a big business in places like china, but to assume that over-representation is purely a function of cheating would also be pretty strange in light of other facts.
I posted this comment on the Sailer thread, but perhaps it might be worthwhile to reproduce it here as well since “Education realist” seems to be raising the specter of Asian cheating everywhere:
Let me offer a perspective as an ethnic Korean who graduated from Stuyvesant a quarter century ago and who subsequently went on to an Ivy League university and a top ten Ph.D. program in my chosen field.
“Education realist” quoted a commenter on his website thusly:
“Leaving out the technical jargon, the Chinese and Koreans are definitely gaming and cheating tests overseas. When you read of recent Asian immigrants acing the NY tests despite limited English, it seems likely they’re doing the same thing over here.”
I arrived in the United States as a middle schooler 1 1/2 years before I took the test for Stuyvesant (and for Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech). At the time I had very limited English skills, but I could tell that in most other subjects (including history, which has been a passion for me since childhood), I was ahead of my peers by at least a year or two. In math, I was probably ahead by three or four. I realized right away that my lack of English ability was holding me back greatly.
So during the following summer, I went to the local library daily for about 8-10 hours a day (excluding Sundays which were for church and related activities). During this time, I looked up every word in an English dictionary. Then I looked up every definition for that word in an English-Korean dictionary. You could imagine what a tough slog this was. It was painfully boring, but I did it because I thought I needed to overcome my crippling weakness. By the third month, the edges of the pages of the English-Korean dictionary (made with very thin paper) had been completely worn and I had to purchase a second copy.
The only things I did during the awaking hours this summer were: studying English, reading, playing sports (I have been an athlete always and was specially selected for volleyball, rifle shooting and baseball in Korea; as well I have been a martial artist all my life and have trained in Judo, Tae Kwon Do and boxing since childhood). My parents allowed me to watch television occasionally, but only on the condition that I repeated after every word uttered on TV, including jingles (“Have you driven a Ford… lately” still rings in my brain). My parents wanted to ensure that I had no “Asian accent.” In this they were largely successful — my accent is a combination of Queens, NY and the Midwest (whence my ethnically German wife of nearly twenty years hails and where I spent much time).
Throughout this period and thereafter in high school, I also read voraciously in English. When Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” came out to great acclaim and popularity, I read this cover to cover, looking up every word I did not understand — and they were legion. I also ended up reading many of the books cited in that book.
I was not the only middle schooler at this library. During the same summer, roughly 25 other students my age were dropped off by their parents most days. Even though Asians were not numerous in my neighborhood at the time, all but two of my library compatriots were Asian. The remaining two were Russian immigrants who appeared to be as intensely academic as the Asians.
Although I do not doubt that some Asian students engage in cheating, my experience and observation are that cheating does not explain the phenomenal rate of Asian acceptance at Stuyvesant. Relatively high IQ and very intense work ethic likely explain the situation more than cheating.
In any case, I was rewarded with high scores. Reputedly, I scored in the top twenty among all test takers my year (subsequently I tested 99 percentile for both the SAT and the GRE; I never took the LSAT or the GMAT, but my prep testing also placed me in the top 1% of those tests as well).
There were two significant scandals during my time at Stuyvesant. One was, indeed, a cheating scandal. The ringleaders of the cheating scheme were mostly Jewish (they were only lightly punished — more on this below). The other scandal was a computer hacking scandal. One of my friends was actually arrested by the Feds and had his computer confiscated. Of the three I knew who were arrested, two were white (one Jewish, one gentile) and third was Asian. They all cut some sort of a deal with the Feds and the Air Force. I heard at the time that one of them went to work for the Air Force part time through high school and college and later full time professionally.
Among my peers at Stuyvesant, cheating was considered a high risk, low reward endeavor. In the first place, quite a few of my Asian peers were intense Evangelical Protestants and wouldn’t dream of cheating. It was considered extremely sinful. Also, for many lower and lower middle class (or “fresh off the boat”) immigrant Asian students without any connection or safety net, the potential consequences of cheating were catastrophic. It simply wasn’t worth the risk. Frankly, the largely white (including many Jewish) teachers and administrators were not likely to (and did not) look kindly upon cheating Asian students.
Those who engaged in cheating regularly at Stuy were more likely to be upper middle class students. They weren’t quite upper class enough to not care about academics entirely (most such types went to private schools, but there were some of those at Stuy). They had highly educated parents who put a lot of pressure on them. But having grown up affluently and easily, they often did not have the “do or die” attitude or work ethic of the immigrant Asian students. Some of them — gasp — did drugs and had sex, unthinkable among my Asian peers. Quite a few of them were more interested in drama and theater (SING! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SING!) than academic work.
Crucially, their parents were influential and aware enough to dig them out when they faltered at school, including cheating. (My own parents would have broken my legs if I had cheated.) Most such students were Jewish, not Asian, at least during my years there. One quite notorious example went on to be one of the “top” students at Stuy. But we all knew that she was a frequent cheater, only took very easy courses (“History of Science”) to maintain a perfect GPA while the rest of us were taking Dr. Irgang’s very tough AP American History, studying differential equations, and taking computer science courses at NYU. She was a joke to us. But both of her parents were Harvard alums, her parents had friends inside the Harvard administration and, unsurprisingly, she went on to Harvard.
I should also note that Asians were not the only economically down scale but intensely academic group at Stuy. There was a sizable Russian immigrant population who exhibited very similar “tiger” characteristics. They were also often poor, but their parents were extremely education-oriented as Asian parents were (the father of one Russian friend of mine was a scientist in Russia but drove a taxi cab in NYC). He would be beaten savagely by his father for minor mistakes on tests.
Finally, there have been several attempts to introduce “affirmative action” for blacks and Hispanics at Stuyvesant. All failed. Usually students and prominent or otherwise politically active parents — rarely Asian, usually Jewish — rallied to the anti-affirmative action cause and stopped it cold. During much of this time, the majority and subsequently plurality of students at Stuy were Jewish. Now that Stuy is overwhelmingly Asian, perhaps it will prove less immune to the political pressure. Or perhaps Asians of NYC today are more political and less “keep your heads down and just study and work” than during my time there. Only time will tell.
NYC did introduce free remedial and test prep programs for “underprivileged minorities” aimed at blacks and Hispanics over the years. I understand, however, that the rate of acceptance for that population has declined despite the free program. Certainly money not well spent from the cost-benefit point of view.
As a post-script, let me note that *I* personally would not encourage my own children to attend institutions like Stuyvesant. I think they serve a wonderful conduit for bright, but economically down scale students who do not have many other options. But for my own children, who have basked in the success and affluence of their parents and who have been thusly privileged and blessed, I have emphasized self-discipline and virtue (in the Aristotelian sense). My children will likely attend military schools or very traditional parochial schools that emphasize God, truth and beauty through a classical education program for their secondary schooling.
My fear is the genuine intellectual geniuses while not be recognized as easily among the horde of overachievers. E.g., the types of people who– in their free time– invented the mathematics (e.g., Laplace, Fourier, Cauchy, Reimann, Galois, et al.) which the overachieving cramsters assiduously study and are now considered the geniuses because they can mimic on tests. But for 99% of everyday life I don’t think it’s a problem.
The problem with Education Realist’s argument is that there’s no evidence of a “mismatch.” Cheating doesn’t appear to have a discernible impact on Asian accomplishment in education or skills or life.
Typically, when students are put in an environment where they don’t belong, you see a mismatch. African American college students who benefit from affirmative action, for example, drop out at noticeably higher rates than their peers.
So where’s the mismatch with Asian students?
* Are they dropping out of school at higher rates?
* Are they disproportionately taking the easier, softer subjects and courses when they get to school? Or failing more frequently in those courses? Or is there some other pattern in school (or life) showing a mismatch?
* Do they lack the necessary skills after they graduate that an employer would expect from a college grad in the job market?
With the possible exception of English language skills for those East Asian students who were raised overseas, I would say the answers to these questions are pretty clearly no.
By just about every standard, Asians outperform. From attending school to taking harder courses to going into the more difficult majors to being less likely to be unemployed, Asians outperform.
So while I have no problem accepting that there are different rates of academic cheating among ethnicities, and that Asians might cheat more in school than the natives, I don’t see that possible fact as being more than a trivial reason for their outsized success.
Razib, it’s hard to discuss this without being accused of declaring all Asians (or even all Chinese, Koreans, and Indians) of cheating. So naturally, I find it quite likely that there’s cheating going on without saying that all degrees are a fraud and as I said in the first comment, the IQ difference does exist. I’d note that the academic probation rate and attrition rate for Asians (reported mostly by public universities) is in some cases higher than whites, in most cases just surprisingly high, and could reflect exactly the sort of problems that come from faking.
I responded to Twinkie in Steve’s thread.
” In particular, I really think he needs to consider the fact that students lie. ”
No. Really?
“Teachers have little opportunity to directly access the relevant data and confirm students’ SAT and AP scores, so I’m doubtful that has really influenced his conclusions, while in day-to-day talk students lying about their performance is rampant, everywhere.”
I am a teacher and a test prep instructor. I work with kids who attend schools that publish their AP scores, and literally no student got below a 5. I also can look up the state test scores of schools that my kids go to and see that no Asians scored below advanced or proficient. None. Yet I teach, in private instruction, many kids who attend these schools but don’t have the skills one would expect.
When scoring high on a standardized exam is an important criteria for admission, I don’t see what’s wrong with rote memorization of vocabulary or answers to certain questions to score high on the test. At that age, a lot of learning is achieved through memorization and the understanding comes later on in life, with greater intellectual maturity. If more and more schools and employers go the “holistic” route for recruiting, will Asians be accused of doing extracurricular activities but without putting enough emotion into it? “They’re just doing these activities so they can get into a good school but their heart is not in it. Just like all their knowledge is just hollow retention of facts.” I can kind of already hear people saying stuff like this because, you know, Asians are automatons who can tolerate inhuman levels of drudgery but are not real people in the sense that they have emotions or imaginations.
And while I’m open to the Education Realist’s notion that Asians cheat more often in school than other groups, it’s not proven.
One has only to note the widespread cheating which occasionally takes place at the military academies to realize chea-ting ain’t just a city in China.
From just two years ago: 78 Air Force Academy cadets accused of cheating on math test
More Asian-Americans are going into the U.S. military, but I feel pretty comfortable assuming that they aren’t disproportionately represented there as they are at other excellent institutions of higher learning. (This source has them at 7 percent of the 2017 graduating class.) Nor do they seem the most likely suspects for cheating on a math test.
And if you glance at this Business Insider list of the “10 Biggest College Cheating Scandals,” nothing jumps out about the list as a whole showing evidence of Asian overrepresentation. In fact, the lead (134 seniors at the Naval Academy were involved in a cheating ring in 1994) is pretty obviously a group of mostly white students who I should point out were bound by the Naval Academy’s Honor Concept not to cheat. That honor code didn’t prevent mass cheating.
The warrior gene (MAOA-L) is also a lot more common in East Asians (60-80% or so) than in Europeans (1 in 3 or so)…. it apparently helps test taking and could partially account for one population testing a little better than expected.
I have read careful what “Education Realist” what has to say re Asian cheating on this site and others site (you know the ones). In all of her (I do think its a her—in spirit if not physically) comments I kind of amaze by the fact that she keeps on saying she love her Asian students, yet is clearly trying to do them harm. There is some dissonance here. Even more egregious is that *all* her assertion are anecdotal. She doesn’t provide any evidence other than stating some of the kids she works with does not seem as capable as the test score would indicate. Now would you want such “teacher and a test prep instructor” working with your kid?
“The warrior gene (MAOA-L) is also a lot more common in East Asians (60-80% or so) than in Europeans (1 in 3 or so)…. it apparently helps test taking and could partially account for one population testing a little better than expected.”
Good Lord!
On a separate note, I wish relating random genes to random outcomes in comments will stop.
More on warrior vs. worrier:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/magazine/why-can-some-kids-handle-pressure-while-others-fall-apart.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&_r=0
Every May in Taiwan, more than 200,000 ninth-grade children take the Basic Competency Test for Junior High School Students…
The researchers were interested in a single gene, the COMT gene…
Here’s the thing: There are two variants of the gene. One variant builds enzymes that slowly remove dopamine. The other variant builds enzymes that rapidly clear dopamine. We all carry the genes for one or the other, or a combination of the two.
…On that score alone, having slow-acting enzymes sounds better. There seems to be a trade-off, however, to these slow enzymes, one triggered by stress. In the absence of stress, there is a cognitive advantage. But when under stress, the advantage goes away and in fact reverses itself.
… Would the I.Q. advantage hold up, or would the stress undermine performance?
It was the latter. The Taiwanese students with the slow-acting enzymes sank on the national exam. On average, they scored 8 percent lower than those with the fast-acting enzymes. It was as if some of the A students and B students traded places at test time.
Nym-pseudo,
Why don’t you focus on Education Realist’s arguments rather than on an elaborate psychological and gender profile.
I agree with you that all of ER’s assertions are anecdotal. I also think that he misunderstands and overweights the poor verbal communication of East Asians as being indicative of their broader lack of understanding.
But he might have a point that there is a strong culture among Asians of doing whatever it takes to succeed in the classroom. Does he overemphasize this when looking at Asian success? Sure. But it’s not like there’s absolutely no reason for him to believe what he believes.
I’d note that the academic probation rate and attrition rate for Asians (reported mostly by public universities)
re: attrition rate, have you written on this? google did not yield anything real quick. as PM notes, lack of mismatch (along with the high measured IQ of east asians on g-loaded tests) is the key reason to believe that cheating has a marginal long term effect/or is not quite so common.
The warrior gene (MAOA-L) is also a lot more common in East Asians (60-80% or so) than in Europeans (1 in 3 or so)…. it apparently helps test taking and could partially account for one population testing a little better than expected.
you need to look at siblings to rule out pop stratification i would say.
re: cheating among asian students. ER’s observations aren’t that atypical, plenty of white liberal college professors who have to teach survey courses complain about their asian (american) students in similar terms, and suggest that they are over-represented in people who are caught cheating, etc. this might be unfounded, but it’s not an aberrant observation. there’s also the model of ‘culture of shame’ vs. ‘culture of guilt.’ i think that’s actually bullshit model now, but people seem to believe in it widely, so it’s not unkosher to present that as an explanation why cheating might vary.
but to restate, we need to go looking for mismatch. it does seem that asian societies tend to underperform in cutting edge science, and the reason often given by asians themselves is excessive authoritarianism and deference to seniority. the eminent population geneticist motoo kimura complained about this in japan, and gave it as one great thing about coming to the US, but from his argument with john gillespie in his later years when he went back to japan it seems that kimura himself internalized the culture of seniority when he had it and would brook little disagreement.
Why don’t you focus on Education Realist’s arguments rather than on an elaborate psychological and gender profile.
I would say that despite her (or is that “her”) prodigious verbosity, she (“she”) doesn’t have any arguments to make. As you and other commentators have point out, there are plenty of priors why Asian does well on standardized test, and their real world accomplishment match what their test would predict. As new evidence, last week Google reported that about 30% of their employee are Asians—-this would more or less match the demography of, say, a respected department of electrical engineering at most university. I would imagine that she would claim that some of those employees cheated to get hired by Google. Despite what she said about loving here students and her work, asserting that her student cheat is not some guileless speculation, its kind of a malicious intend.
you can’t know someone’s intent. in any case, as you yourself acknowledge there are plenty of substantive grounds of engagement. since you’ve already entered your suppositions into the record, let’s end that line of thought.
I can’t get beyond the cognitive dissonance of these stereotypes about Asians that 1) on the one hand, Asians are drone-like grinders who conform and do not take risks and 2) on the other hand, they get ahead, because they cheat, i.e. break rules and incur the attendant risks that could be catastrophic for their future careers.
“Educational Realist” writes “I’d note that the academic probation rate and attrition rate for Asians (reported mostly by public universities) is in some cases higher than whites, in most cases just surprisingly high, and could reflect exactly the sort of problems that come from faking.”
There is a lot of “mostly,” “some cases,” “most cases,” “surprisingly,” “could” — a lot of qualifiers that render the sentence meaningless in an exact sense. The sentence seems designed to illicit a certain feeling (“Asians cheat!”) while leaving an avenue of logical escape (“I didn’t say ‘all Asians’!”).
In any case, may I please see the relevant data? Or at least the citations to the same that assert this? Probation and attrition rates are very specific words. I assume ER can make this data that he has seen available to the rest of us, so we can elect to ignore our lying eyes and believe his claims.
Since we seem to be handing out personal anecdotes, here is the relevant portion of my response to ER on Sailer’s thread:
On a final note, I taught and graded undergraduate students for several years while working on my Ph.D. Every year, I caught a few students cheating. Mostly they were athletes. The remainder were almost always upper middle class kids, usually white (but never the scions of the super rich and powerful — those kids just seem to float through life living large and dating extremely attractive peers). The common denominator among academic cheaters in my experience was a sense of entitlement, that they “deserved” to have good grades, but didn’t have to work for them.
Aside from the athletes (on whose behalf the university administration usually intervened), the cheaters also invariably had influential or otherwise “vociferous” parents who were all too willing to bail out their children from sticky situations. It was clear to me that the vast majority of cheaters came from environments who seldom experienced consequences for their transgressions. This was very consistent with my experience among my peers at Stuyvesant. I don’t think this fits Asian-Americans, especially recent immigrants, all that well. Of course, the story may be very different in Asia itself where I gather there are plenty of Asians with influential parents who can manipulate their systems.
Sorry, I meant “elicit,” not “illicit.” Mea culpa.
i’m not super interested in this cheating issue. as i say above i have heard instructors complain about asian students in a way which made me open to ER’s suggestions. but after spending a little time and looking at some papers the attrition data doesn’t indicate mismatch. on the contrary.
being asian is strongly correlated with finishing a doctoral degree
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11162-011-9250-3
being asian is strong correlated within finishing a STEM degree
http://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/00551c876cc2f027,2169e6f2193aa3b5,51598a50171d37b5.html
if asians students are cheating, they are nevertheless highly competent at progressively higher levels of difficulty nonetheless.
Well I kinda felt like responding since on a couple points I think you’re both wrong.
For one, the data do indicate mismatch, insofar as the number of Asian Americans getting doctoral degrees. Asian Americans get doctoral degrees at much lower rates than they achieve things performance in high school calculus. That much is true, whatever the reason behind it but the mismatch could be argued to be there. I do not think this is much of anything that isn’t benign because I like my hypothesis (namely, that it’s Asian students at, say, the 90th percentile in innate ability who through culture and hard work ethic succeed disproportionately in high school, as compared to whites. The disadvantage of “cram school” or anything similar isn’t for those students here but in the fact that maybe 50th percentile students might be pushed to things they can’t or don’t want to do).
At any rate, the mainstream media, blank slate sort of hypothesis is very very wrong – the idea that wealthy people are buying their way to success at al levels or something, or random chance plays into things a lot. Even accounting for the fact that it’s disproportionately white females dominating in humanities and social sciences, the Asian rate goes down in other fields as well.
See:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2011/pdf/tab23.pdf
The overwhelming majority of Asians in graduate programs are actually foreigners, called nonresidents or whatever in other databases. As I said, it’s at least a plausible debate if attracting foreign nationals as a policy by universities has been driving out actual Asian Americans, because the perceived Asian “advantage” in academia falls off in graduate school (Asians might trend a little towards medicine, law and medicine counted as a professional degrees and not academic doctorates)
Educationrealist is also wrong about the implications he’s making regarding AP exams, I’m sure of it.
He likely has not taught at general public high schools that have 100+ students scoring 5’s on AP tests like Calculus or Chemistry. There’s nothing besides anecdotal evidence that all the students he interacts with are mostly even the same students taking these classes in a given school he’s been in. The total number of scores reported by the College Board for Asians nationwide, and for all California students specifically do not suggest these scores are even being obtained at his school.
https://apreport.collegeboard.org/
See appendix C, at least.
What he might fail to realize is that AP subjects outside of STEM are all relatively easy, his own ability to judge that notwithstanding, and believing students he observes show a mismatch in skills is not different from high performing students anywhere in the country. To get a good score in a History class or something does not require anything shocking, and if he believes less elite students are doing so it’s not good evidence of cheating. A higher proportion of students with higher scores is also not evidence of cheating over work ethic, because AP exams are not scored particularly harshly such that students have to fail, and I don’t think he’s observed a difference from the national statistics for whites and Asians both (which are very similar in score distributions for most tests; it’s URMs that have huge distinctions). The implication all his posts really seem after is that he’s observed mismatch or overperformance on meaningful STEM tests and that still isn’t true, the rest simply doesn’t matter.
My purpose is not to *prove* anything. I can’t. Nor, as I’ve said many times, do I think that Asians (specifically Chinese, Koreans, and Indians) are *all* faking/cheating/gaming—that is, Razib, nothing I’ve said is inconsistent with the strong success rates of Asians in higher education. Were we to figure out and prevent the behavior I describe, I would still expect Asians to be overrepresented in higher education, high test scores, college admissions and so on.
Razib asked a question: why is the media ignoring the Asian overrepresentation when speaking of minorities? Why don’t they acknowledge that “holistic” admissions would hurt Asians, not whites? Why pretend otherwise?
So partly, I’m answering his question. Getting beyond the usual suspects–journalists are white liberals who like blaming institutionalized racism–the lack of concern for Asians exists in part because Americans, particularly whites, particularly white elites (a group that includes journalists), don’t see the Asian academic obsessions as particularly admirable. Not only is it not really what we want in “smart” people, it’s forcing white elites to rely more on connections than meritocracy. That means white professionals who aren’t of the “elite” class are having a more difficult time getting their kidse into excellent schools, because those slots are filled with Asians and legacies (as well as blacks and Hispanics through affirmative action). And again, it’s one thing if the kids are just smarter, better, but by American values *as we’ve understood it*, they aren’t. It doesn’t help that the universities, determined to use affirmative action in some way, have weighted grades more heavily than test scores.
But being liberal journalists, the media folk don’t really want to go there and be explicit. Hence they’ll attack the issue from all sorts of areas (lots of stories about overseas cheating, underrepresentation of Asians in management, etc), talk about “parental pressure” leading to cheating without mentioning race, all without really addressing the underlying issue, which is a sense that this isn’t really behavior we want. Even if we say we want it.
And then, a) I agree with the opinion I’ve just expressed above, b) I’m not alone in this belief, that this belief is partly why there’s discrimination against Asians by college (which in no way justifies it, and c) rather than celebrating Asian behavior, we should be doing a great deal to encourage Asian children to be more American. (and while many Asians say “American” when they mean “white”, I do mean “American”.)
For one, the data do indicate mismatch, insofar as the number of Asian Americans getting doctoral degrees. Asian Americans get doctoral degrees at much lower rates than they achieve things performance in high school calculus
this is so stupid that i’m wondering if i misunderstand. look at the % of asians in medical student (this is overwhelmingly american because med schools are supposed to train americans)
https://www.aamc.org/download/160146/data/table31-enrll-race-sch-2011.pdf
most people who do well in calculus don’t become scientists or engineers. they do all sorts of things, from business to law to medicine. this is obvious, ergo, the comment strikes me as dumb (also, in the labs i’ve worked in high achieving asian american undergrads seem to prefer med/dental school much higher ratio to high achieving white students, because of value orientation). look at the % asian as you go up educational attainment, it keeps going up:
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
obviously a HIGHER % of asians who get bachelor’s degrees go and get advanced degrees.
#37, ok. your original comment seemed to emphasize cheating a lot more than the last, but that’s fine. though if at some point you could tweet me the attrition data i’d appreciate it. also, (and while many Asians say “American” when they mean “white”, I do mean “American”.) is this really true? when i was growing up in the 80s white and black people would always ask me where i was from (e.g., ‘where are you really from’). that doesn’t happen anymore, at least with people born after 1980 or so (baby boomers still now and then complement my lack of an accent). so are asian american kids really using ‘american’ this way, except with their parents?
The context is relative to white students, I could see that wasn’t clear in that chain of response, sorry. Not in absolute terms, of course and obviously other minorities fall off a cliff. In other words
Suppose that n% of Asian American students are “elite” individuals.
Suppose that m% of white American students are “elite” individuals.
Some people seem to think that data at the high school level indicate n > m, but data at the doctoral level do NOT particularly reflect that, across most fields. I would argue data at the high school level don’t really allow us to make a good estimate of n or m at all, (nor are cheating or certain other possibilites reflected) but in any case there is inconsistency.
It does seem that Asians are much more likely to go into law or medicine (guessing the latter) so that is interesting overall. Also interesting that the number of law or medicine professional degrees has increased by about 30,000 in a 10 year period.
I can put this more clearly, perhaps for the benefit of other commenters, if they feel there are concerns in the causal explanations of trends, and what seems to be a discrepancy, in a sense.
By numbers like AP exam performance, and the SATs look similar, Asian Americans for some time have been ~25% of the white-and-Asian total of high-achieving high school students (though this is perhaps by the most favorable calculation towards Asians)
By 2010 numbers Asian Americans are 15.5% of the white-and-Asian total of all doctoral level degree recipients (seemingly skewed in favor of medicine, law, or other first professional degrees)
Obviously issues with other minority groups not counted.
Even if Asians do cheat during their educations, (I know a lot of them and I have no reason to think that they do) once they graduate they are still capable of performing the same duties as that of highly educated employees. I think they consider most of what they have to learn only necessary to graduate and not valuable in and of itself. I work at a large main library and the children’s room is always full of Asian kids. When the kids get old enough they become library volunteers and then valued employees. I have a lot of complaints about our current crop of employees, but very few for the Asians among them. They are bright, sociable and never argumentative. They learn quickly and they perform tasks beautifully. They value family and friends and once done with their educations, strike a balance between work and play. I think education is over valued anyway. I’d rather train someone on the job. In the old timey days you just went to school til the eighth grade, then worked your way to the top. I dated a football player from Texas A&M. He always felt bad because he felt he didn’t learn anything in college. They had people take tests for the athletes. Big time cheating there. He was, though by no means an intellectual, able to become a mortgage broker in Hawaii.
“Educational realist,”
You write, “My purpose is not to *prove* anything. I can’t. Nor, as I’ve said many times, do I think that Asians (specifically Chinese, Koreans, and Indians) are *all* faking/cheating/gaming…”
This is pure sophistry. You are knocking at a straw man. Were you to suggest that “all” Asian academic success were contingent upon cheating, I would not be arguing with you but simply dismissing you as a lunatic or some sort an obsessive, irrational anti-Asian.
Your previous comments leave a strong impression that you suspect a large explanatory variable for Asian achievement is pervasive cheating (or moderately higher IQ PLUS pervasive cheating). You make a series of unproven assertions based on this assumption of large-scale cheating and, when challenged to provide evidence, retreat to the wiggle room you left for yourself: “well, I did say, ‘not all Asians cheat.’”
You stated this: ““I’d note that the academic probation rate and attrition rate for Asians (reported mostly by public universities) is in some cases higher than whites, in most cases just surprisingly high, and could reflect exactly the sort of problems that come from faking.”
Well, that’s a pretty specific statement. Please show us where you obtained these probation and attrition rates for Asians being higher than those of whites.
Look at it this way. Are blacks over represented in the NFL?
What happens right before the NFL draft? The combine. And what do athletes do right before the combine? They work their ass off to game the system. Athletes work tirelessly at drills like the 40 yard dash to shave off .1 of a second. Is this cheating? Are blacks screwing over white athletes?
I think you can see the foley here. Blacks are better able to dominate the NFL combine no matter what white people do. Preparing for it before hand only widens the gap that is already there. White people could complain about gaming the system or cheating. Or say that it’s not fair because hyper training for a test like the combine ruins leisure time for whites. But all of this is a moot point because blacks are just more gifted athletically.
Asians do better on tests because Asians are smarter than non Jewish white people. It’s not cheating.
Funny. This is a post that signals how Asians, a successful minority without political clout, are likely to get squeezed out of avenues for upward mobility by politically powereful whites. And the comments are about how asian achievement is unamerican! But considering that the sailer (the source for this post and some of the commentors) is increasingly an uncloseted white nationalist, its not surprising.
As the proportion of Asians increases, expect to see more efforts to keep Asians out of elite meritocratic institutions by making them less meritocratic, accompanied by campaigns to devalue Asian success (they cram, they cheat, they aren’t creative, they’re unamerican). This is a majority groups normal response to rising minorities.
The short term question is, are American political institutions flexible enough to allow Asians to fight back, and can Asians get their political act together. I think the answer is “yes” in California, “no” everywhere else.
The long term question is, once Asians overcome temporary obstacles and establish themselves in the American elite, how pissed will they be at the groups that tried to keep them down?
Education Realist has written well over ten thousand words on his blog about Asian cheating. As blogs go, that’s a lot of verbiage. He plainly believes this is an important issue.
He also says in #16 that the gap between Asian test scores and their abilities is “often shocking,” which implies there ought to be a mismatch somewhere in the data between their test scores and their academic or job performance. But if there’s a gap, he hasn’t shown where it’s at. Perhaps Asians are just very good at cheating at life.
He now says he can’t prove anything. But of course he could, if there was a genuine mismatch that went beyond the trivial and the anecdotal.
The absence of any such evidence ought to give him pause and force him to reevaluate what he believes he’s seeing. Instead, I now see he has written an overelaborate analysis of what the media is really trying to tell us about Asians.
This is even less convincing than ER’s argument about the prevalence of Asian cheating. At least there, he could rely on his experience as a teacher of many Asian kids. I’m not sure what, if any, experience he has with analyzing the media’s intentions.
Twinkie said:
I can’t get beyond the cognitive dissonance of these stereotypes about Asians that 1) on the one hand, Asians are drone-like grinders who conform and do not take risks and 2) on the other hand, they get ahead, because they cheat, i.e. break rules and incur the attendant risks that could be catastrophic for their future careers.
With a lot of East Asians/Indians I think the virtue of achieving so outweighs everything else there is never really a conflict with cutting corners or evens rules of laws. I always thought test prep was a mild form of cheating. A lot of viewers thought < a title=”"Twinkie said:
I can’t get beyond the cognitive dissonance of these stereotypes about Asians that 1) on the one hand, Asians are drone-like grinders who conform and do not take risks and 2) on the other hand, they get ahead, because they cheat, i.e. break rules and incur the attendant risks that could be catastrophic for their future careers.
With a lot of East Asians/Indians (excluding Japanese) I think the virtue of achieving so outweighs everything else there is never really a conflict with cutting corners, minor rules, or even laws. I always thought test prep was a mild form of cheating. A lot of viewers thought Arthur Chu’s using game theory to win at Jeopardy! was scheming, if not cheating. I’m sure it is viewed approvingly and clever by non-European Americans. I’ve known Asian students who will buy $150 textbooks for the following semester, photocopy (this is a decade ago) it at his/her school student aide job, and then return it for money. When it comes to education and money (ultimately materialist tendencies are at the root of it anyway) things like copyright laws and rules are inconveniences.
Asian Americans for some time have been ~25% of the white-and-Asian total of high-achieving high school students (though this is perhaps by the most favorable calculation towards Asians)
don’t see a calculation, see just a number made up out of thin air. you need to create a high achieving category with precise criteria, and then see if there is a drop-off in % with advanced degrees. as you imply 25 percent seems a bit too favorable a calculation.
I always thought test prep was a mild form of cheating.
you are aware that asians need higher test scores to get into the same selective universities as whites, right?
I’m sure it is viewed approvingly and clever by non-European Americans.
good to know that we have a resident asianologists who have the awesome ethnographic survey that their own intuition.
people need to start adding a little more data to the comments or i’m going to have to force some tightening on the moderation.
Slava writes:
This is an example of how Asian-Americans just can’t win with some people. Chu used a perfectly legitimate strategy based on game theory to win a game show and became a hated figure for it.
If they had any sense at all, they probably thought it was silly that so many whites would make such a big deal out of tradition on a game show.
Much to his credit, Jeopardy!’s all-time winner, Ken Jennings said that Chu’s strategy was exactly right and that all contestants should follow his lead.
Maybe we should outlaw working hard, too. You know, just to cover all the bases.
Razib I gave a link to latest AP exam score data (unfortunately the site formats it as excel, not a pdf or something convenient, but hopefully that’s not a problem?). Not trying to be contrary.
Asians are around 25-33% of high scorers in subjects like calculus, the sciences, and still pretty high in fuzzies.
I again don’t see this as a concern, this and other data doesn’t reflect mainstream media thoughts about wealth and privilege and students “buying” their way to success anyway, and I don’t see the cheating explanation either. Because high school stuff isn’t that hard, and the data is at least consistent with hard work and effort from a larger number of decent-if-not-elite Asian high school students regardless of background, income and so on.
I think in terms of raw ability you really just have something like a slight possible difference, 5% of white students and 6% of Asian American students are “elite” and this is eventually reflected through the higher education levels and sorts itself out; the “elites” aren’t particularly sorted out in high school by the current US system. There might be some underperformance from whites from rural Alabama or Kansas and not from NY or California but the biggest underperformers at the high school level for policy to focus on are the other non-Asian minority groups anyway.
However I see recognizing the differences in the data as useful because some people might have different or less benign explanations.
As far as higher education goes I did track down more full statistics from the Education departments for all fields. (might as well link both bachelor’s and doctorate level, and of course the devastating underperformance problem for non-Asian minorities is a concern but that’s something we already all know)
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_330.asp
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_337.asp
Also, while I personally favor affirmative action conceptually, I think the raw data indicate serious issues with how other liberals in terms of politics and the mainstream media do currently conceive of things.
For one thing, it really is not necessary to curb Asian American enrollment or anything like that at all in order to improve affirmative action programs for other minorities. So current problems with that are sheer stupid political problems, it doesn’t have to be that way from any philosophical standpoint. If there is any concern for Asians at all, I think the raw numbers reinforce my personal observations and experience that there could be a problem with foreigners pushing out actual Asian Americans as a concern.
For big fields like law or medicine (which as you noted don’t really bring in foreigners much), affirmative action really could be done if desired, assuming you had to have zero-sum totals, by effectively decreasing white enrollment for a few more other underrepresented minority groups.
The real story is nonresident aliens in academic fields, not that those individuals are bad, but as an indication of where resources are being spent, and not just private institutions like Harvard which can choose to do whatever they want but public ones as well. Alternatively, the amount of flat effort it would take to just do things is not at all in proportion to all the fuss over affirmative action, given black and hispanic numbers are so low. In absolute terms, and in terms of bachelors degrees there are clearly enough people out there to make it work, that universities could be made to make an effort if they want to – forgetting pointless politicking.
Like, a hamfisted rule that every PhD granting university, per field like engineering has to take 2, TWO, more black and hispanic candidates a year would hugely increase the raw numbers. Don’t even change other policy or enrollment, just a stupid rule like that could be managed ad hoc. Yes that’s “quota” thinking but it’s vastly easier and would work in the 10 year short term more than complicated bureaucracy does now. When you find barely 1 PhD student per university per year it’s not even an affirmative action issue, a couple hundred good big universities can just do that. Also, increasing black & hispanic enrollment by removing a paltry few slots of nonresident aliens in any field would be something public universities could do that would be “neutral” in time-and-resources. It’s shockingly awful how the political conversation around affirmative action is in light of the actual facts.
Razib I gave a link to latest AP exam score data
AP is coarse (5 point scale?). what you need to do is look at IQ distributions. to my knowledge last i checked, a while ago, there’s no attrition at all.
The real story is nonresident aliens in academic fields
as you know, this varies a lot by academic fields. e.g., at my university many life science fields have only a small minority of international students (though actually lots of post-docs). engineering is about half international.
p.s. and within the life sciences asian americans differ in representation. ecology has few. neuroscience has a fair number. why? nothing to do with aptitude, all to do with cultural orientation of the type of science you want to do.
Slava,
You write:
“With a lot of East Asians/Indians I think the virtue of achieving so outweighs everything else there is never really a conflict with cutting corners or evens rules of laws.”
And you know this how? East Asians and Indians in this country have much lower crime rates than every other racial group, including whites. Even American-born Asians (there is this strange paradox of assimilation in crime — foreign borns, whether white, yellow, brown, black, all have lower crime rates than their native-born counterparts) have substantially lower crime rates than whites. No less a race-realist and white nationalist as Jared Taylor has documented this: http://colorofcrime.com/.
You also write:
“I always thought test prep was a mild form of cheating.”
Studying for a test is cheating? Do you feel that pupils should be tested completely au-naturel? In other words, I suppose they should be tested without any teaching or education, eh? Just pure IQ only? Should we also hand out jobs this way? Just selection based on IQ, hardwork be darned? Select for that 1% inspiration only and ignore the 99% persperation?
this thread has run its course.